RaveThe New York Times Book Review... gripping ... The success of A World on the Wing in navigating that challenge rivals the astonishing feats of the birds [Weidensaul] chronicles ... Those feats and the jaw-dropping science behind them form the heart of the book ... Since the days when he first wrote about the subject, Weidensaul by his own account has steadily been drawn from the role of observer to participant in the hands-on science of migration. This allows him to give us portraits of the scientists and concerned community members alongside whom he has manned the barricades, trying to understand the losses in bird populations and stem them ... Along with the conservation success stories, this constitutes the most hopeful aspect of the book: that better technology and the metadata of the Information Age have made new insights possible and created the opportunity for effective, targeted solutions to the ills plaguing our migratory birds ... All of this ecological focus, written accessibly without sacrificing an iota of the science, still might have made for some dry reading, if not for Weidensaul’s knack for evocative passages and immersive scenes ... At its best, A World on the Wing brims with spectacle ... The passion Weidensaul brings to these scenes is personal ... As the birds flit through these pages, but with ever less frequency through our lives, we can only hope that birders and non-birders alike take inspiration and a call to action from A World on the Wing. This is the kind of book we’ve been waiting for.
